🚀 go-pugleaf

look is a V7 / BSD utility that looks up a pattern in a sorted file,
using binary search, which is much faster than *grep when it works.
I'm currently using the Sun version of look, which is presumably
unmodified from the original, and it does ugly things like
truncating lines that are too long and exceeding array boundaries
and having limits on how long the patterns can be.

So I either need to rewrite it or find a public-domain or free version.
The BSD source code I have is ugly, and I want to stay out of the
Net2/BSDI fight so the lawyers don't kill me.
The 1988 Minix source is a lot more primitive, though I could use it;
it's got only a subset of the features because that's all they cared about,
and it seems to be uncopyrighted doesn't-say-if--it's-public-domain
like real software :-), which might be an issue with our company lawyers
if I want to release my improved code.

But if there were some GNU code there I could start with,
it would probably either already do what I want,
or be a starting platform that would require me to free it.
Has anybody done one?
--
				Pray for peace;      Bill
#Bill Stewart 908-949-0705 wcs@anchor.ho.att.com AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ
# Trickle-Down Economics: Giving money to government bureaucrats 
#	and hoping some will trickle down to the people who need help.